Illegal Liaisons (7 page)

It was practically all women at the first session of his creative writing class.

The older ones sat in a group by the door, the younger at the head of the long table by the window. The two men – one a balding thirtysomething, the other gray-haired – sat a fair distance from each other.

Cecile introduced Jonathan: the author of three books, a journalist with a degree in literature, a Pole who’d gone to school in England, studied in France and had been living in Brussels for the past few months. Jonathan nodded, his eyes on Cecile’s long neck, adorned with a red necklace.

“… will in a moment introduce his schedule for the course in creative writing,” she concluded.

Jonathan opened his laptop and rose to his feet.

“Good morning,” he began. “I’m very pleased to be able to put forward a program that, at this stage of my life, I believe to be the most interesting. I hope it will also inspire you.”

He looked around at the faces turned toward him. Attentive eyes and encouraging smiles; one of the young women kept nervously pushing back her hair as it fell over her forehead, the balding man mechanically drew circles on a sheet of paper.

“Before I introduce the subject of the course, I’d like to say a few words about myself.”

He leaned over his laptop and the photograph of a gap-toothed little boy appeared on the white screen behind him. The older women
laughed, the younger ones exchanged glances. The men looked at Jonathan questioningly.

“Thank you for the excellent introduction.” He turned to Cecile. “After so many kind words all I can add is that … the lad behind me is also me.”

The women smiled, the older man adjusted his glasses. Jonathan pointed behind and said: “I had fewer teeth …”

They laughed; the thirtysomething put down his pen.

“… and fewer nasty experiences. Drugs, of course.” He waited for them to relax completely, then grew serious. “But I hold on to this photograph and, what’s more, look at it sometimes. Why? Because so much is happening around us. We rush to work in the morning, to collect the children in the afternoon, do the shopping on Saturday, organize family outings on Sunday. Or we feed the cats and stress about foreign language exams. From time to time we meet people we really like. Too rarely. Just as we all too rarely calmly breathe the air that reminds us of past holidays, too rarely do we simply sit and gaze aimlessly …”

He cast his eyes over the gathering; they were listening to his every word.

“I believe it’s important,” he continued, pointing at the smiling, gap-toothed boy behind him, “not to lose sight of oneself. And in writing, that, I believe, is what’s most important.”

“Two beers on Luxembourg Square?”

“I don’t know what time Megi …” began Jonathan.

“Three beers.” Stefan’s voice sounded decisive. “Come earlier and you’ll make it for happy hour, beer’s half price.”

Luxembourg Square, a cosy square surrounded by low-rise buildings, was crammed with office workers. Black specks in suits moved around between tables and trampled the scrap of lawn which had automatically become the smoking area. Jonathan locked his bike and made his way to O’Farrell’s.

Stefan, who, judging by his spaced-out eyes and gargantuan smile, must have drunk a fair amount, edged closer to his friend.

“You know Rafal, the last party was at his place.”

Jonathan nodded.

“Yes, he came to dinner. When you weren’t there.” Jonathan tried to make it sound like a reproach.

“His wife’s terrible.” The drunken “sss” drew the attention of the other customers.

“What’s that?” Przemek leaned over toward him.

Jonathan remembered how he had tried to make fun of Przemek, saying that, professional or not, he thought the man was slippery. He teased Megi because he knew Przemek was after her, but she was annoyed when Jonathan made fun of her new colleagues. With his perfect English and French, he had no idea – in her opinion – what it was like to be constantly accosted by colleagues “from the West” about where to find a “cheap Polish housecleaner.” “You don’t know what it feels like when they say Poles can be intelligent, too.” She was furious. “It’s covert racism!” Which was why she was all the more impressed when Poles consistently and obstinately climbed the Commission ladder.

Jonathan sympathized with her patriotism but couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for Przemek. “He’s the sort of person who sees life as a transaction,” he argued.

“What’s terrible?” Now Rafal, too, was leaning toward them.

Stefan opened his mouth but Jonathan gave him a warning tap on the shoulder.

“He doesn’t know what to say,” he winked at the others.

“I’m celebrating my birthday next Saturday,” the Indian woman sitting diagonally opposite said. “Will you drop in?”

“Can I bring someone?” sputtered Stefan.

“Of course you can. I’d like to meet your wife.”

“Wife?” Stefan’s finger shot up. “What the hell are wives for?”

Jonathan reached for the peanuts and caught his sleeve on Rafal’s glass. The beer spilled in a frothy puddle.

“Sorry, I’m terribly sorry,” Jonathan pleaded as he got to his feet. “I’ll call the waitress. Stefan, we’re going!”

Jonathan struggled across half the city with a drunkard and a bicycle but, finally, managed to deliver Stefan home. Freed from the weight of his friend’s body, he felt surprisingly unsteady on his feet, as if standing on rickety scaffolding. And what if both of them were going through a stage of accosting younger women? Every man at some point experienced the irrational fear that he might not get it up one day, but did the way they
were behaving mean that the serpent of anxiety had slipped from their minds to their bodies?

He mounted his bike and pushed at the pedals. He rode clumsily, uncertain whether it was the effect of the beer or the vision that he was fleeing: he and Stefan, their shoes and false teeth highly polished, cravats around their necks, sitting in a sanatorium and boasting about the number of lovers they’d gone through while they still could …

When Megi left for Luxembourg on business, Jonathan already had a babysitter lined up. It was only so that he could go to the gym to get the strength for a Sunday full of paternal duties, he repeated to himself. He even took his gym gear but, spraying himself with his favorite scent, he no longer deluded himself – his body knew perfectly well what it wanted. He left, waving goodbye to Antosia and Tomaszek, unable to force himself to give them a hug. He was leaving them, going to Andrea. He felt contaminated.

There was a smell of incense in the church, candles blazed, but the pews were empty. Jonathan grew apprehensive. He had walked with a sure step but, in his mind, saw himself going home. Over the swirl of uncertainty, fear, excitement, and lust drifted the rhetorical question, “What for? What for?” But now, when Andrea had not come, he desired her with childish greed.

She emerged from the shadows of a pillar and a wave of heat ran through him as though he were a teenager. A few minutes later they were driving through the city in solemn silence. Jonathan had imagined many times what they’d do if an opportunity like this finally arose – Simon gone to England, Megi staying the night in Luxembourg. And now his fantasies dissolved, the glow of text messages extinguished. Erotic anticipation had turned into a barrier between driver and passenger.

He didn’t try to slip his hand beneath Andrea’s skirt. This was entirely unlike the times they’d met over the past weeks when, drunk with frustration, they’d caressed each other in churches, back streets and empty parking lots. Now, she stared at the passing brasseries while he, with the care of an old man, drove the car across the roundabouts of Ixelles.

Entering Andrea’s apartment, Jonathan was struck by the smell of Simon’s cigars and the gnawing thought that he’d never yet been unfaithful to Megi. Sometimes they attracted each other, sometimes
repulsed, but until now he’d never gone with another woman, even though opportunities had arisen.

He stood there as if in a waiting room, shifting from foot to foot. Suddenly he felt Andrea’s fingers on his lips – and sucked them with the instinct of a newborn baby. She was familiar, tasted like a wild apple; she was unknown, the tart smell of her perfume excited him. Her lips were full, moist, her pussy warm.

She drew him onto her – for a brief moment they were still separate beings – but then Andrea wrapped her legs around his hips. Listening to her guttural groans, Jonathan climaxed and in his head clattered the startling thought, “What a relief, what a relief …!”

T
HE SECOND LESSON
in creative writing was like the first day of school. Grown-up pupils pulled out their notebooks or brand new exercise books when Jonathan entered; they listened attentively and jotted down a reading list. He gave them homework – they were to dig out their oldest memories of love.

On his way back, he breathed in the warm smell of the city. The arch in Cinquantenaire Park blazed in the light of the setting sun. Erected in triumph at Belgium’s conquest of the Congo, its symbolism reminded him of the Palace of Culture in Warsaw but was aesthetically far more pleasing than the Russian gift. Perhaps because the history of Belgium meant little to him.

He reached Merode roundabout and walked toward the park. Cars sped along the tunnel beneath him. They were going toward the arch but never reached it; they didn’t spring from the tunnel until past the Schuman roundabout. On the square by the arch, some Arabs were testing the power of their mopeds. The room of students flashed in front of Jonathan’s eyes again, giving him an instinctive feeling of contentment. Something told him he had drawn them in, that he was going to succeed in picking out, from the skeins of their emotions and the density of their patterns, the threads of the stories they were determined to spin.

He didn’t get his hopes up that there might be a real writer in the group. To him, they looked more like people who wanted to write about
what hurt them. He suspected they’d cry with anger if personal fragments didn’t fit in with their work, but such were beginnings. That was why he had immediately placed a mirror in front of them – their own memories. The sooner they began to delve into themselves, the better. Best they began that very day, in the enthusiasm of their September start.

He entered the park. Trees muffled the din of the mopeds; birds rounded off their conversations before the fall of dusk. His phone vibrated with two text messages, one after the other. “How did it go?” and “I long for your hands … I want them on my hips.” He immediately replied, “I’d take your hips and lower them on me.”

After his first night with Andrea, when he got home in the morning, the nanny leapt from the sofa, her hair dishevelled. He paid her and peeped in on the children. Tomaszek was asleep with arms outspread trustingly; Antosia was on her side, collected and intent, even in sleep. Jonathan went down to the kitchen and poured himself a whisky. He rarely did so; Megi didn’t like alcohol on his breath at night. But his wife wasn’t there now, not in the house, not in his thoughts. His skin, clothes, and hair smelled of Andrea; his thoughts clung to her, danced around the moments spent together, stroked that other reality.

He was surprised not to have a mental hangover. First times tend to be disconcerting, which was why he sometimes ended up that way. With Petra it had been different, and then with Megi. And now with Andrea. Their moves, which that night had replaced the web of meanings spun by text messages, were simpler than words but didn’t seem awkward to them. Thanks to the haze of enchantment that engulfed them from that first, accidental kiss, they lay together unashamed.

He knocked back the rest of the whisky and smiled at his reflection in the kitchen window. He hoped Andrea felt the same – tingling in the tiniest parts of the body and corners of the mind, excitement that was not relieved by orgasm. Although he’d had her four times that night, he was still burning with desire to be with her.

He went to bed and fell into a shallow sleep, longing for their recent closeness. He awoke in the delirium of memory: her arching hips, his intoxication as he climaxed, the taste of Andrea’s lips, those above and below. The following day he was still elated by the electrifying recollection.

It wasn’t until Megi returned that he took fright. Because although he’d slipped back into every day life with his usual facial expressions – grimacing in anger as before at the children’s disobedience, the windshield wiper not working in the Toyota or the long list of shopping – he was someone else after that night in Ixelles. His body was now entangled with another body. He had another woman. Their night, the hours of deep penetration and provocatively slow nearness, made Andrea seem no further than a centimeter away in his thoughts.

A
FTER FOUR DAYS
of her cousin and husband staying with them, Jonathan realized Megi felt like biting someone. It was not that she disliked Adelka. They were more or less the same age, the children got on somehow – especially ten-year-old Paula and the slightly younger Antosia – while the husband was what was called a nice guy. But when they’d announced their arrival, Megi – who in the past would have been pleased that her relatives had forgiven them for “leaving their homeland,” proof of which were the emissaries – was on edge and close to being rude.

“It’s understandable,” Jonathan reassured her as, locked in their room, they ignored the morning bustle as their guests prepared to go sightseeing. “This is your daily life, work, family. You get up at six every morning while they’ve just come to laze around.”

“But she’s my cousin. What’s suddenly made me like this,” said Megi, wrapping the duvet around her.

“Calm down, they’re leaving in two days.”

“Oh God, two more days!”

Jonathan laughed, then immediately turned serious. Megi really was heated up. Hardly surprising: the move, a new job, new colleagues, stacks of migration documents to fill in and formalities to sort out, all this in at least two languages – and now guests!

“As it is, I admire you,” he said. “I’ve always admired you. You’ve got so much patience with people.”